2 U.S. Pilots Killed in Copter Crash

A U.S. Apache attack helicopter crashed Monday north of Baghdad, killing both Army pilots.

The AH-64 crashed in Mashahidah, about 25 miles from the capital. Mohammed Naji told Associated Press Television News that he saw two helicopters flying toward Mashahidah when “a rocket hit one of them and destroyed it completely in the air.”

A third soldier was shot to death in central Baghdad, the military announced. His unit was assisting Iraqi police at the site of a vehicle fire.

On Monday, the U.S. military also raised the death toll in last week’s Fallouja attack to six, announcing that three female service members were killed in the ambush on a convoy. It previously had said that one female Marine died in the attack.

At least 1,740 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

Insurgents also continued to target Iraqis in Baghdad. A car bomb exploded between a movie house and Sunni Muslim mosque, killing at least four people and wounding 16, authorities said. Two other people were reportedly killed when a roadside bomb exploded near a police patrol in the Azamiya neighborhood. This morning, a man in a police uniform blew himself up in a hospital in the town of Musayyib, 40 miles south of Baghdad, killing three people and wounding 13, police said.